By Rebecca L. Grant, Ph.D., Vice President, Lexington Institute.
February 27, 2025 – As if not enough is going on in the world, the Chinese military has flown two new stealthy jets. Some military observers consider them a tangible threat to the U.S. One is a bomber, and one is a fighter. This episode of The Federal Drive with Tom Temin covered the Chinese planes, plus the U.S. F-22, B-21, F-35, and the future Next Generation Air Force fighter called NGAD. Link here and readout below.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin: And you’ve been watching military aircraft for some time now. Tell us what is the latest development in China? What’s going on there?
Rebecca Grant: Back in December, China flew not one, but two new stealth aircraft. And these two stealth aircraft show a lot more advances in design in the composite materials probably used to make them. So it was really a little bit of a shock. We’re always expecting to see some advanced aircraft out of China, but one was a larger aircraft. The other one was a smaller demonstrator. And so that tells us that China has, again, not one but two new stealth aircraft ready. And their mission is to challenge the U.S. and allies over the Pacific. And frankly, their mission is to threaten Guam, threaten Hawaii and kill American airplanes if there’s ever a fight.
Tom Temin: Well, how do we know the capability of these things? There’s been some fuzzy video at great distance. But has anyone put a hand on it to see what it’s made of or how many engines they have or how stealthy they actually are?
Rebecca Grant: Exactly. We know a good bit more about the J-36, which is the larger of the two aircraft made by one of China’s top aircraft makers. Unusually, analysts think that this has three engines. Analysts also think that it’s a good bit bigger than, say, our F-15 fighters, but a lot smaller than our B-21 bomber, sort of the size of a medium fighter bomber like the old F-111 back from the Cold War. And we know a little bit about this because the Chinese flew the J-36 with a J-20 chase plane. That’s another one of their fighters. So we were able to kind of measure and see what it looked like. The really striking thing about both of these planes is they have minimal tails or control surfaces telling us that they’re aiming to get what we call an all-aspect signature reduction. That means making that plane hard to see in radar or infrared, and not just from the front, but from the side and the back as well.
Tom Temin: OK. And do we know how fast they go or what kind of armament capabilities they have? And can they maneuver in a way that makes them dangerous to U.S. warplanes?
Rebecca Grant: That’s such an excellent question and we don’t really know about speed. They don’t look to be supersonic aircraft. They look to be high speed but going for the stealth and the long-range design. The J-36, in particular, is shaped like a delta wing. It’s a lifting wing body. And that design is for range. That means they want to be able to get out over the Pacific. We already see the older Chinese bombers making runs on Guam on practice missions on a fairly regular basis. We’ve seen Chinese bombers and aircraft up around Alaska. So, this J-36 is designed to be a plane that if it goes into production, it could just pop up about anywhere. The smaller one, the J-50, is much less clear. Can’t even tell really if it was manned or unmanned. So, it may be like one of our collaborative combat aircraft drones or it may be a fighter in its own right. And you asked about weapons. That’s real important. The Chinese have some very, very nasty long-range missiles, like PL-15, that are able to target. Unfortunately, our larger aircraft, our tankers, our aerial control aircraft and the sub-hunters like the P-8 from Boeing. And in the Chinese mind, they’d like to be able to target our bombers, the B-52s and the stealthy B-2 and the B-21 that’s coming into production. So, we’ll see but we know that’s what the Chinese are trying to do.
Tom Temin: Right. And do we know they can turn them out in numbers that would make them a threat? Because it’s one thing to make the first copy. As we learned with the F-35, that only took 20 years. But making the several hundred others has been problematic, to say the least.
Rebecca Grant: And China tends to go a bit slowly in production, partly because they have a little bit of a different problem. They’re doing really a coastal defense, a defense of their own territory and then projecting out into the Pacific. So, in some ways, they don’t need as many. They don’t do a lot of foreign military sales like we do with the F-35, which we sold over 20 different allies, which is great. But so that’s what we’ll really be watching to see. Are these designs mature enough? Normally when you fly a stealth aircraft, there’s a lot that has to be looked at. It takes a couple of years to shake out a new design to see if it’s good enough in its signature reduction and to solve other problems that come up in flight test. If it’s one of our aircraft, certainly in the past, you would expect to see some modifications before it goes into full rate production. That’s not as true with our B-21 Raider stealth bomber, which was digitally designed and is really, really super and went into production quite quickly. But for the Chinese, I think it will be a little while. The scary thing, though, is they’ve made some really notable advances, particularly in changing using metal for the wings and the fuselage to using composite materials. That’s going to give them a lot of signature reduction. And unfortunately, they’ve really made some strides. I think their engines are not as good as ours. And the J-36 with its three engines to suggest to me their engines are still a little bit underpowered. And that gives the U.S. an advantage over China in the advanced engine arena. But overall, it was a pretty disturbing development. And not just me, but that is what the Air Force said too.
Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Rebecca Grant. She’s a military analyst at the Lexington Institute. Well, the question is can we just build more of what we have or does this put them somehow, technically a step ahead of what we are able to produce at this point in the United States? What’s your opinion there?
Rebecca Grant: Well, our best step is to build more of what we have. I would say in no case are either the J-36 or the J-50 from China better than our F-22 stealth fighter or better than our B-21, which is in production. So, what this tells us is we need more of what we have on our hot production lines. That means the B-21 Raider bomber. We need to continue our buys of F-35, which we were buying, but we can certainly buy them a little bit quicker. And this tells us that we will have threats in that airspace over the Pacific that we didn’t expect. And why do we care? Well, it’s essential for our nuclear deterrence with China building up its nuclear weapons and also really important for conventional deterrence. We don’t want the Chinese to think they can get away with flying all over the Pacific in a wartime scenario.
Tom Temin: Right. And the F-22 you mentioned, that ceased production some years ago. I think Secretary Bob Gates canceled that program kind of summarily. He was very troubled over budget. And the ones that we have, most of them are mothballed at a given moment or they’re not ready to fly and fight. I think half the fleet at a given time is kind of sitting there. So, what’s your sense of what the Air Force should do generally here, just to maintain the deterrence that it’s always enjoyed?
Rebecca Grant: Well, you’re right about the F-22, although I will point out that F-22 spent six months in the Middle East watching over Iran and helping with the defense of Israel and our U.S. forces there. So, a share of them is really ready to go at any time. But you’re right, the Air Force has to move ahead quickly. They do have a secret new fighter plane to replace the F-22. It’s known by the acronym NGAD for Next Generation Air Dominance. The Air Force can green light that tomorrow. Really, they expected to make a decision last summer, but put it off for the new Trump administration. So, what would I do? I’d buy NGAD, get that going, up the buys of F-35, continue development of our advanced engines that we have GE and Pratt & Whitney working on and then I would just double the buy of the B-21 Raider so that we really have the air power to keep China in check.
Tom Temin: But in the larger sense, the Air Force, like the Defense Department itself, has struggled to get these acquisitions under any kind of predictable control. I mean, the F-35, some people consider it a disaster. There’s no two are really alike and there’s software glitches. And it’s I don’t even think it’s totally 100% up to full capability even now. And so, what kind of effort do you envision behind the hardware, construction and acquisition for the Pentagon to get its act in order to somehow maybe make these things come out more regularly and more predictably?
Rebecca Grant: Well, software is very important, but the Air Force has run out of time. They’ve got to buy what they have. They’ve had some good combat success with F-35, as has Israel, which shot down a cruise missile with their F-35, which is really quite advanced. So, the F-35 is a terribly difficult, long program. But the jet itself, man, it is ready to go. The Navy has it. The Marine Corps has it. And so, the Pentagon just needs to go ahead and buy what they have and then start to make this transition towards unmanned aircraft. They call them collaborative combat aircraft. These are drones that fly alongside to do electronic warfare missions, carry more munitions, you name it. We’ve got to get to that manned-unmanned teaming where we’ve got some manned fighters and bombers and some drones out there. That’s how we’re going to keep ahead of things. And one thing above it all, we have to keep space superiority because all these new planes and unmanned drones really depend on that space superiority input as well.
Tom Temin: And by the way, how many B-21s have been constructed so far? Do we know?
Rebecca Grant: A handful. We’ve seen a couple out in-flight test. Of course, it’s all very classified, but I think there are a handful at this point and moving into producing several a year. The Air Force one’s 100. They should probably go to 200. And honestly, they really ought to probably set up a second production site for the B-21. They can turn about that much more quickly and avoid some of those long, dragged-out program costs you mentioned with the F-35.
Aired February 12, 2025, 1:38 PM.
This article was originally published on the Lexington Institute: Two New Chinese Warplanes Could Mean The End Of U.S. Air Superiority (From Federal News Radio) | Lexington Institute
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